Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm happy to have with me a writer whose work I've always enjoyed.

Clover Hope, she is a contributing editor at Pitch Fork and

she wrote a great new book called The Mother Load, a hundred plus women who made

hip-hop.

Was it originally going to be 100 and they just couldn't keep it to 100?

Actually, it was going to be about half.

Like I started out with probably around 60 and then the more I sort of like kept

researching I was like what if I did a hundred? What if I went past a hundred?

Yeah and then the plus was like, yeah, let's do plus.

Because then let's make the plus like symbolic,

you know, like it's goes beyond even 100, you know?

Well, it's largely divided artist by artist as the title suggests, but what it ends up doing is telling a very necessary story, which is just obviously the story of women in hip-hop, which is such a rich tapestry and such a great way to

look at the history of rap overall. There's so much life and music in this book there's so many chapters that could and should

be turned into books of their own one of the things I took away from it was the

number of stories of sort of frustrated potential.

Lady of Rage and other artists who never released their debut albums.

They never got to where they should have been

because of sexism and other structural factors factors and that's for all the success stories that story is told again and again how much of a takeaway was that from the whole thing for you.

Right and you know the thing is that so many artists end up kind of sitting on shelves.

It's not that it's a thing that's unique to women, but what makes it like more of an issue is that you just have so few

to begin with so it's kind of like if you have one female rapper who's like just

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